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Will summers ever be the same after Flintoff’s Ashes?

In our first exclusive extract from the 2006 Wisden we look back on how cricket became the new football

By Roland Watson

April 8 2006, 1:00am, The Times

FUNNY things happened during the summer of 2005. Footballs disappeared from playgrounds. Families looking for a bat and stumps to take to the beach scoured shelves in vain. The Times put a cricket picture on its front page every day for a week. Cricket was reaching those it had never reached before.

During the crazy weeks of the Ashes, newspaper headlines initially asked, then announced as fact, what became a widely accepted truth: cricket was the new football. That is to say, cricket was splashed on the front pages as well as the back, it topped the broadcast news rather than tailing it. The dinner table, the water-cooler and the public bar hummed with the latest dramas of an ever-tilting series. Many who could not…